The Object of His Desire (erotic romance suspense) Read online

  His hand was at the back of my neck, suddenly, his strike like a viper’s.

  His lips were hard against mine. Clumsy. Hungry.

  I put my hands to his chest and pushed, sharply, and he staggered back, caught as much by surprise as by the force of my push.

  I stepped back, found the door, turned, and then I was running back along that corridor, tottering in my Jimmy Choos and intensely aware that I was in this stranger’s vast home, running from him, in very high shoes and no panties.

  7.

  “You okay, Trude?”

  Ethan.

  I found him on the terrace outside the orangery, standing on his own and looking down the lawn to where his bride stood with a small knot of people.

  Ethan.

  “Sure. Sure,” I said, gathering myself. “Hey, bro’. It’s been far too long.” We hugged, and then Will emerged from the house. He paused, and looked pointedly at us, and then joined Neil and a couple of others.

  “He bothering you?” asked Ethan.

  “I can handle him,” I said.

  “You be careful,” said Ethan. “Nobody messes lightly with Willem Bentinck-Stanley. He’s used to power. He’s used to having what he wants, you know?”

  I shrugged, and Ethan continued: “No, really, he is. All this? It’s effectively his. His pop still sits in the House of Lords once or twice a year, but it’s Will who keeps the family empire going. They own all this, and far more. The estate. The church. You’d have to drive for miles to get away from land they own. Did you see the village? That’s theirs too. They own it all.”

  I’d passed through the village of Yeadham on my way here. All flint-walled buildings, with the woodwork painted a single shade of dark green. I’d thought it was probably done that way because of some local by-law, not because it was all owned by a single family.

  “All of it?” I asked. Then I grinned, and punched Ethan on the arm. “Hell, boy, you done good! Didn’t you do well?”

  He paused for a second, and then that Dunkin’ Donuts grin broke out across his face and he laughed, and said, “Hell yeah, sis’. I done good!”

  §

  I steered clear of Will after that, but couldn’t help but notice that he kept looking at me. It was hard to tell if he was amused or pissed at me.

  I had another glass of champagne with Charlie, but no more, mindful that I was driving. I really should have booked a hotel up here for the night, but even after a couple of years I had trouble gauging the distances in England. Everywhere seemed so close together, and yet somehow I had at least a three-hour drive home ahead of me tonight. Maybe I’d just drive off and find somewhere. Once I had a good signal I could Google local hotels on my phone. That seemed like a plan.

  Then, wandering back through the orangery to find more drinks, I heard him, Will, talking in a too-loud voice to a small group of men. The atmosphere there was suddenly loud and leery. I turned away, but not before he’d seen me, and said something in a lower voice that I couldn’t quite make out.

  Laughter. Stares.

  I glared back, not sure why I was suddenly in this kind of stand-off with a bunch of toffee-nosed drunks.

  The guy to Will’s left laughed louder than the others, his face flushed pink with drink. “Really?” he said to Will. “She did what? She hit you...?”

  Will shrugged, and smiled a steely smile. “That was only the first round,” he said, as I started to back away. “But you wait and see. I’m going to have that one, just you wait and see.”

  I turned and rushed out of the orangery to the terrace.

  Down across the lawn, I could see Charlie talking to the musicians in the open-sided marquee. Ethan and Eleanor were there too, lost in conversation and smiles.

  I turned and strode in the opposite direction, round to the side of the Hall where red-coated stewards were waiting to park and return the cars. Before I’d even reached them, my Mini was waiting for me, the engine purring softly, and then I was away, heading down the long, tree-lined drive, away from Yeadham Hall.

  I’d text Ethan later, make my excuses, my apologies for leaving so abruptly.

  Struggling to remember the way, I turned left, and soon I’d passed the chapel and was following the narrow road through that flint-walled, green-painted village that was owned by my brother’s new family.

  That look in Will’s eye. The drunken, arrogant look.

  It was like when he’d shown me that Van Gogh, when he’d shown me the Constable...

  I remembered Charlie’s words, and Ethan’s from later.

  Will was a man who always got what he wanted. A man who appeared to own half the country, and who always had his way.

  And now, it was quite clear, he wanted me.

  It was a heady, intoxicating feeling.

  I felt like a princess in a fairy tale. Would everything be different in the morning, all back to normal?

  And if he did really want me, would I even have a say in the matter?

  §

  I drove home, the late-night journey far easier than the drive up.

  I pulled up, parked in my permit-holders’ space in the street outside, and went up to the front door, and there I found a single red rose, a card attached to it with a ribbon.

  The card was plain, creamy white, and all it said was a big, hand-written ‘W’.

  The message was clear.

  He knew where I lived.

  He wanted me.

  And if he wanted to, he would have me.

  Pursued

  8.

  So...

  Let’s recap, shall we?

  Late that night, the night after my estranged brother Ethan’s wedding, I drove home and found a red rose on my doorstep. The single bloom was accompanied by a card bearing the initial ‘W’.

  ‘W’ for Will, AKA Willem Bentinck-Stanley, the brother of Ethan’s new wife, and scion of an old English family that owned half of the county of Norfolk and almost certainly much, much more.

  Will. Near-black hair, dark, penetrating eyes, the kind of casual strength in his touch, the strength that said ‘Push me and I’ll crush you’. An athletic kind of guy, rough-looking, bordering on unkempt. The kind of man who turns up to his own sister’s wedding looking like he’s come straight from another party and then spends most of his time talking on his cell phone. A man I’d never met before Ethan’s wedding and yet who had the unsettling knack of making me blush at the most trivial prompt.

  A man accustomed to getting whatever he wants, or so I’d been told.

  What had led up to that single red rose?

  Well there had been my Jane Austen moment, for starters. That thing when you catch a stranger’s eye across a gathered room. Or, in this case, across a crowd of guests waiting to squeeze into a tiny rural chapel for a wedding. He’d paused in the doorway to get everyone’s attention and usher them into the chapel. Our eyes had met, held, moved on, then skipped back.

  That kind of thing.

  Just a look, a rushed fluttering of the heart. Nothing more than that.

  The ‘more than that’ came later, when he showed me round the family home, the stately mansion known as Yeadham Hall, where the wedding reception was being held. The kind of place where they hang family portraits painted by Rembrandt, a Constable landscape of the Hall and its grounds; a van Gogh sunflower displayed with no fanfare in a bedroom, would you believe? Art was something of a thing for the family, Will told me, as if it was barely worth comment.

  Everything was very casual, matter of fact, as he showed me around the Hall with the paintings in the hallways and on the bedroom walls. It was like a museum, this mansion where he and my new sister-in-law Eleanor had grown up. That whistlestop tour of privately owned art was one of the oddest experiences of my life, being shown round this place and realizing it was someone’s family home.

  Almost as odd as finding myself running away along those corridors, fleeing from Will after he had taken me by surprise and kissed me. Up to that point there had been a
tension in the air, a definite sexual buzz between us, but I'd played down its significance. I should have known what was going to happen, and maybe I did. I should have known he would take me in his arms, a firm hand at the back of my head, that when he took me like this I would melt into his embrace, forget myself, give in to that kiss, before coming to my senses, pushing him away, staggering backwards. And then running away from him, in my new Jimmy Choos and no knickers.

  No knickers? That’s another story entirely. That was all down to Charlie.

  §

  “Just because... just because of what happened,” I said, over a cappuccino in a Caffe Nero just around the corner from my Covent Garden office. “Just because of that... well, don’t you start thinking that anything has changed, okay, Charlie? Don’t you start thinking there’s an ‘us’ again, okay? That’s over. That’s thirteen months over, okay?”

  Charlie. I’d lived with Charlie for close to twelve months, in the small Islington apartment I still called home a little over a year later. The last I’d seen of him as he was leaving was that nimble sidestep and duck as the ashtray hurtled past his ear and made a nasty hole in the inner wood panel of the door.

  Charlie. Honey-blond hair, sharp blue eyes, and, as I discovered when I bumped into him again at Ethan’s wedding, a man who still had the easy knack of being able to wrap me around his posh little English finger. A man who knew all the buttons to press, all the vulnerabilities, all the weaknesses.

  A man who could spend an hour seducing me and I’d only worked out that was what he was doing when he had me up against the church wall, his thigh hard between my legs, his hand crushing my left breast.

  That was where the knickers came in, or rather where they left.

  I’m a professional woman, a commissioning editor at a venerable British publishing imprint. I have a Yale education, I come from a respectable New York family that had moved out to a large Connecticut home when I was little. I had been brought up to be strong, and to know my place in the world.

  So why was my self-esteem at such a low ebb that when I went to Ethan’s wedding I wore suck-me-in Magic Knickers to keep everything slim and firm? I’d felt safe wearing them because I just knew nobody would ever get to see them.

  So... that grinding, the leg between the thigh, the rush round to the back of the church where we were out of sight, the wandering hands, the pressing bodies... that thing that happens when two people realize just how desperate they are for rude, raw sex...

  That.

  Well suck-me-in knickers that go up to at least your second rib simply aren’t made for rude, raw sex. Too much beige, for starters.

  So I did what any resourceful girl with a good education would do. I pinned him to a gravestone, blindfolded him with his tie, then whipped off the Magic Knickers and hurled them as far away from us as I could manage.

  And so it was that, some time later at the stately home where my brother’s wedding reception was being held, I found myself running away from the heir to the family estate in high heels and no knickers (not that Will knew that – I’d stopped his wandering hands before that point), feeling incredibly vulnerable and more than a little confused by the rush of events.

  And now, a few days later, I found myself sitting in a Covent Garden coffee shop gently explaining to my ex-boyfriend that just because we’d got it on like wild animals at the weekend– “...don’t you start thinking that anything has changed, okay, Charlie? Don’t you start thinking there’s an ‘us’ again, okay? That’s over. That’s thirteen months over, okay?”

  He sat there, both hands wrapped around his cup as if he was trying to warm them even though it was still August and in the mid-eighties outside, and he smiled that lazy smile of his, and I knew he wasn’t listening. Or, more likely, he was listening and laughing because, arrogant schmuck that he was, he simply chose not to acknowledge what I was saying.

  You know that kind of conversation? I’d had so many of those with Charlie during our year together. All those trivial exchanges where he’d got his way and ignored anything I might want or think... That’s the kind of thing that almost always culminates in an ashtray flying through the air, or at least it does in my experience.

  But Charlie wasn’t always like that, or so I was learning. On the day of my brother’s wedding I’d seen a whole new side to him. The man had hidden depths. He had, God damn it, sensitivity. Now how had I missed that before?

  Since our folks had died eighteen months ago, Ethan and I had been the only family we had. We may not have been that close in the last year, but we were still family.

  When I’d gone to the wedding I’d wondered why Charlie was being so attentive and why I was so edgy. It had taken a touch from Charlie, him leaning closer and saying, “I understand.” And then finally I got it: there was Ethan marrying into a family with a large network and ancient traditions – if he had found a new family did that mean I risked losing all I had left of my own?

  Charlie.

  Irritating, smug and surprisingly sensitive Charlie.

  “There is no ‘us’,” I said again, as he sat there cradling his coffee and outside in the street London rushed past in all its glorious variety.

  §

  So... at what stage does denial become futile? And at what stage would denial get laughed out of any court in the country?

  There is no ‘us’.

  Charlie had a place in Aldgate now. Not quite the heart of the city, not quite the incredibly up-market whirl of docklands. Charlie was always neither one thing nor the other. He could be so obvious a lot of the time and yet, well, I’d never suspected him of sensitivity, for a start. Not so much hidden depths as not entirely surface. There’s a difference, but I was only just starting to see it. Charlie was a man who tried, but didn’t always succeed, to hide himself behind a glossy veneer, that posh English thing that could mask almost anything.

  That posh English thing that he could use to wrap me round his little finger, even now.

  Denial.

  This doesn’t mean anything, Trude. There is no ‘us’. My inner voice, justifying the unjustifiable.

  It was a modern apartment, some kind of industrial building that had been stripped out and completely refitted. A concierge to buzz us in to the airy lobby, an elevator already summoned and waiting.

  That elevator, its mirrored walls all around us. Even the inside of the doors were mirrored. As I looked over Charlie’s shoulder it was as if I was watching another couple. A man in a blue suit, pinning his lover’s arms up above her head, her wrists enclosed in his strong hands. His hips twisting and pressing, his neat ass just visible below his jacket, tightening with each thrust.

  I could feel him, hard against me. His face smooth, just a fuzz of stubble, almost velvet-like, a coarse velvet. His lips firm, moist, working along my jaw, then teeth, needle-like, sharp on the lobe of my ear. Those teeth, scraping down the side of my neck.

  He had me pinned, trapped with his body, with his tight grip on my wrists. He was a rough lover, Charlie; that was another reason the sensitivity had surprised me. He liked to control. He liked to pin me, to hold me, to take out his pleasure, and there was something about that roughness, the surprising brutality of this well brought-up English man, that made me buckle, made me wet, made me want nothing but to feel him inside me once he’d got me like this.

  Charlie.

  There is no us, Charlie. There is no us.

  9.

  Denial.

  Denial is no good when you’re on your knees, his hands in your hair, holding you still as he drives himself deep into your waiting mouth.

  We’d tumbled out of that elevator, into a small lobby area with four apartments opening off it. He’d keyed his door, manhandled me inside, and even as the door was swinging shut behind us I found myself dropping to my knees, his hands buried in my hair.

  I freed his belt, yanked at his pants, his shorts, and then his manhood was free, swinging from side to side, hard and wet. The swollen end pres
sed against my lips, then slipped away across my cheek. He adjusted position, holding me closer, and then his length was sliding into my waiting mouth, pushing so deep that I gagged.

  There is no us, Charlie. This is something else. Something different. This isn’t us, Charlie. This is need.

  I wrapped my fingers around the base of his shaft, gripping him tightly, working him with my hand. With my other hand, I reached through between his legs, moving upwards, my fingers sliding along his crack, pressing and teasing.

  Charlie. The man with the newly revealed sensitive side.

  His thrusting was hard and fast, hurting my mouth. I squeezed shut around him, increasing the resistance, the friction and suddenly he slowed and I could feel a throbbing as he tried to stop things happening too fast. I squeezed with my hand, held him there, and slowly the pulsing eased.

  Now it was my turn.

  He liked it rough, but he also liked to receive as well as to give.

  I stood, put my hand to his face, cupping his chin between forefinger and thumb.

  “I’d just like to remind you,” I told him, “that there is no us.” And then I kissed him, my mouth salty from his juices, my hand still gripping his chin.

  There was a door, and I pushed him back against it, manhandling him with my body.

  The door swung open and there was a wide bed, windows from floor to high ceiling, the room lit only by the city spread out beyond the glass.

  Charlie’s legs buckled when the backs of his knees hit the edge of the mattress. He tumbled backwards, and then I was on him, my black pencil skirt riding high. No Magic Knickers tonight, as I ground down against his hardness with the coarse lace of my thong.